Maintaining quality of service in the eyes of customers is an important factor in services industries. This is the case in the wireless/mobile communications industry, as well as the traditional wireline telephone industry where customers often base their decisions to join, or stay with a particular service provider based on the quality of the services provided. For example, with respect to wireless telephones, events such as recurring dropped calls, poor sound quality during calls and unexpected unavailability of service may drive customers to seek a new service provider, especially given rising standards for call quality.
Currently, various techniques exist for monitoring quality of service in the wireless communications industry. Some of these techniques, such as PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) obtain objective quality of service information. For example, PESQ measures voice quality by comparing an input test signal with the signal output across a connection. Another objective technique, ITU-T E-model (e.g., ITU-T G. 107) predicts conversational MOS (mean opinion score) from IP networks and/or terminal parameters. Subjective techniques also exist where test mobile devices are established to monitor sound quality. Service providers often arrange for such testing immediately following deployment of new networks, new network elements (such as base stations) and network changes or upgrades, etc.
The techniques described above are often difficult to implement, may be limited in their capability to monitor an entire network, and may be expensive, especially in the case of call quality monitoring techniques that utilize specialized infrastructure in the wireless environment. Many of these techniques may also cause unwanted load on the network. In addition, it is often not practical to implement such techniques on a regular basis. In addition, current quality monitoring techniques are difficult to implement throughout the entire network, especially when networks may span large and diverse geographical area and the test devices have to be frequently mobile to simulate as much as the real user experience. For example, current quality monitoring techniques may be implemented so that a single sector is used to report on the quality of an entire region. Accordingly, it may be difficult to accurately monitor all areas of the network using such techniques.